Travel: Lima

I’m laying in the bottom bunk in a dark dorm room at a hippie hostel in the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru. Some seafood I ate yesterday was a little off and I’ve been laid up in bed since then. I skipped breakfast this morning, and only made it out of bed to eat a light lunch. A piece of fruit or something. Everyone else in the room, maybe six or seven people, slept in until two in the afternoon and then left. It’s was either almost midnight now, or maybe it’s already early tomorrow morning, and they haven’t come back yet.

I’m listening to a podcast about unsolved murders. Luckily this series has a back catalogue, and I’ve been working my way through. I’m a little pissed at myself for being sick and stuck in bed listening to my iPod when I’m in a foreign country. This might be the only time I come here.

The door to the room opens and I can hear a couple people come in. They are whispering and muffling their laughter. I have the lights off because I want to sleep. I can’t tell if they know I’m there or not. They don’t turn the lights on so I figure they know someone’s here. They go across the room to the bunk in the far right corner. I’m in the far left. They go quiet like they are going to sleep.

I’ve been thinking about death in a new way in Peru. I went into this old Church for a couple dollars. There were a lot of people in the pews, pilgrims or locals or just tourists like me, I don’t know. They were mostly kneeling towards the altar and praying. This was a big place. One of the biggest churches I’ve been in. I don’t believe in God, but I enjoy going into churches. This one was special. Sometimes churches feel esoteric or aloof like they are meant for people who only think of higher things. Some, especially in America, are completely unadorned and all the action comes from the congregation itself. Not much point going in there during the off hours. This one felt different from ones I’ve been in before. There was a small room underneath the altar where every bishop of Lima since the 1700’s was entombed. They each had a stone plaque with a name and time of service. There were even some open graves waiting for the next guy and the guy after him. After you left that room and crossed a stone hallway decorated with indigenously styled Catholic icons, there was a two or three foot doorway into a catacomb. They had excavated most of the graves in there, and covered them with glass so you couldn’t steal souvenirs. Down a claustrophobic path and through an even smaller door was a fifty foot pit dug straight down into the earth. At the bottom I could see a single femur sitting on a pile of dirt. I got the impression that some time in the past this entire pit had been filled with human remains.

I was struck by the closeness of worship and death.

In the national gallery, I saw traditional death masks, conquistador icons of angels holding trumpets and muskets, Jesus Christ with the skin tone and facial features of an indigenous Peruvian, and a pre-Columbian urn depicting an orgy of the living and the dead. A boxy brunette woman throws her head back in anger or pleasure as she grasps at an aroused skeleton.

Sex is, in a way, a means of escaping death. We are the shadows our dead ancestors still cast on this Earth.

These scenes have been going through my head all day. I find it meaningful, therefore, that as I listen to the story of a young woman who was kidnapped and murdered through my earbuds, I come to realize the couple who tried so hard to be quiet coming into the room have been discreetly fucking the entire time they’ve been in here.

I wondered whose bone this was, or if it even mattered. Maybe it was left by mistake.

At some point they finish. It’s hard to tell when. Then the rest of them come in. These people in my room all seem to know each other, or else they just made friends really quickly. A couple are French, a couple some type of American. Some Australians too. Lima is different from the cities in Argentina I’ve spent the last month in. People come here for different reasons I guess. Surfing, partying. The people in this hostel are younger and whiter than the ones I stayed with in Argentina. One of them is rolling on ecstasy. She takes a pill case out from her backpack on the bed next to mine and shows it to one of her friends. Her voice has this breathy quality to it that makes her sound far away.

“I’m fucking hungry,” one of the French girls says. She either turned on a lamp, or some of the overhead lights, because it’s light enough to see now. She and one of the guys leave to eat some leftovers in the hostel fridge. The group splits and reforms in different ways for the rest of the night. One of them gets mad when she finds a used condom in her shoe, they scream obscenities in French and English, eat more food, change clothes and finally leave. I don’t know when these people sleep. I’m not mad, I would have slept through all this if I wasn’t sick. As it is, it’s a new experience. I feel like I’m hidden inside one of the props on some stage somewhere.

The next day I force myself to get out of bed at noon. I wonder if anyone has even noticed that I’ve been laying in my bed for the last two days. If they noticed, I wonder what they think. I wish I could read their minds. Getting a glimpse into the life of another is the strangest feeling. What are the bars like that they all go out to at night? What do they order there? Pisco sours? Cusqueno? Bud Light or Heineken?

I missed breakfast but luckily there’s still coffee. That’s about all I feel like anyway. They use this thick sweet cream here instead of milk or half and half, so the coffee is close to a full meal.

I go out for a short walk to see the central square for the last time. My stomach is still killing me. But, it feels good to be outside and part of the world again. The last couple days felt like a fever dream.

A white angel loads his musket

Whole blocks of this city are indoor markets selling the same souvenirs to tourists. Alpaca sweaters, coca infused liquor, pottery, toy llamas. On a quiet morning you can walk through one of these markets and someone will jump out of every stall to offer you something. Everyone wants you to look at what they’ve got, everyone calls you amigo and waves you over.

The most famous museum in Lima used to be the Gold Museum. It was full of all these ancient artifacts made out of Incan Gold. A few years ago, historians discovered they were nearly all forgeries. If there were ever such artifacts, they were long gone. Maybe they got melted down and sent back to Spain, or maybe they never existed at all. The museum is still there, in a corner of the city there’s no other reason to visit. Now it’s a museum about Incan forgeries.

The Cliffs of Miraflores

Last, there’s a long promenade along the cliffs. You can run or bike or just walk past the parks and scenic overlooks of the Pacific ocean. If the sun is out it’s quite beautiful. Instead of seagulls or pigeons, flocks of green parrots sit in the trees and in the grass. They squawk at you and beg for scraps. What strikes me about the promenade is the enormous nets draped over the cliff faces to stop rocks from falling into the sea. Some day the nets won’t cut it anymore and pieces of Lima will start to break off. Rock by rock the city will disappear.